Unconferences are at the core of openness.

For CodeAcross NYC, we are complementing the hacking with teaching and learning. This topic is to hear what datasets you want explained, problems you want to discuss, or general open data or civic tech topics you want to discuss.

Rules of an unconference

Community and information - unconferences are born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.

No spectators, only participants - everyone must pitch in with one, or otherwise volunteer / contribute in some way to support the event. Prepare in advance, and come on time.

Law of two feet - If at any time during our time together you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet, go someplace else.

Is there a schedule of events? I would only be able to attend on Sunday and I would like to know if it makes sense for me to come in the middle. The eventbrite makes it looks like you guys will be there all night until Sunday at 3:30pm, is that correct? Or is the weekend broken into smaller portions?

Athena is an open source network visualization project showing who’s who and what’s what in civic tech. We'll be hosting a workshop first thing Saturday to go over what it is, and how you can contribute no matter what your skillset. (There are a lot of ways to contribute).

About Athena:There are so many people and projects in civic tech, it gets hard to keep track. Well, you shouldn’t have to. Instead, you can use Athena to understand what’s happening in civic tech in our own communities and around the world. And it's more than a wiki – you can view the connections between entities, whether it's funding or data usage or project collaborations. Athena lets you put yourself on the map.

As someone who recently moved to NYC from California, I'd love to hear about Beta NYC's history. Successes to date, fabulous failures, lessons learned, what are the real barriers in civic tech, plans for the future, and most importantly how to get civic digital not "a slice of the pie but the pan" as your vision document eloquently puts it. Cheers, PA

Hi. I'll be doing a session at 4:00PM on Staturday... not sure what to call it exactly but we'll use ol3, NYC basemap tiles, OSM, Geoclient, NYC Open Data, and some of our code from github to build some maps... Maybe get into a little OpenGeo Suite too if there's time.

@soudea basically, if you are coming to CodeAcross, we'd like you to stick within the realm of the theme. I guess we could have colored paper indicating data, technical/data, policy, etc. I'll work on that tonight.

At the event, we'll have a huge board for people to tack up their session ideas. "How to make a GeoJSON object" would / will be a great one.

soudea:

Are the Unconferences organized by themes? Like Mapping, web development, data analysis, etc?How do people know which unconference to join?

As per my contribution, I could spend about 5 minutes teaching folks how to make GeoJSON objects.

I am a developer at Socrata and will be supporting this event. We offer a cloud-based open data platform that hosts the NYC open data portal and other data portals for well over 100 government organizations worldwide. I’m super excited for this event and I will be holding a workshop on Saturday to teach about the SODA APIs. If you’re interested in learning how to take advantage of our Open Data APIs, please stop by! Bring your questions and let me know if there are specific things you’d like me to include in the session.

In the workshop I plan to cover:- Introduction to SODA APIs and developer resources- Simple to complex SQL-like queries on live datasets- Geospatial queries- API demos with awesome NYC datasets like 311 Service Requests- Discussion / Q & A

Session time: Saturday at 3 PM

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Discussion on API Design

I also plan on hosting a discussion on API design on Sunday. In the session we will examine, from a design perspective, the Socrata Open Data APIs (SODA) used not only for data consumption but also for data publishing (primarily used by our government customers). This will be a theoretical conversation about how to design effective APIs. We will mostly concern ourselves with RESTful web-based APIs because I know them best but it would be great to dive into other realms of APIs as well.